Blog Post

I will never cease to be amazed at the ways that my sermons always find their way back to, well,…me. I don’t intentionally try to preach things that are hypocritical, in fact I usually am good to admit that I’m as much preaching to myself as I am to my congregation. Inevitably, however, my sermons tend to come back and smack me in the face in the least expected of ways. As one of my common sermon themes is the necessity of change, you’d think I would be pretty good with change and newness in my own life. Unfortunately, that really probably couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I am a creature of habit; I’m learning to embrace this truth, as I grow older. I like things my way, my familiar way, my very comfortable and familiar way! Case in point: my upcoming vacation. As you read this, the 2017 UCC General Synod is wrapping up and I am gearing up to head back from a busy week in Baltimore and jet off to the United Kingdom for a week and a half of R&R. I’ve been planning this trip across the pond for quite some time. Many reading this might know, I did my doctoral work in the U.K. Far from being a time filled with traveling and taking-in of the local culture, those years were mostly spent chained to a desk in a basement archive. Thus, I had decided this would be the trip where I got out and saw all the things that I’d never seen before. There’s just one problem: I planned my vacation to place me in all the areas I’d been to previously.

To be honest, I didn’t do this on purpose. Certainly, I wanted to go see old friends, but I had not intentionally placed myself in a situation where I would -almost inevitably be doing the same or similar things, with similar people, at similar places! Nonetheless, this was the reality of the situation. It wasn’t until a friend asked me “What new things are you going to go see on this trip” that I found myself thinking: “Wait a minute, I’ve set myself up to just do the things I know and am comfortable with. Oh good grief!” Thankfully, hotel reservations can be changed, flights can be amended, and -in a pinch- the national rail system can get me just about anywhere in Her Majesty’s Islands. This unconscious aversion to change, in my personal life, got me thinking about change in the life of the church, particularly for pastors.

“Change” is the hot watchword of this era. We in the mainline church are keenly aware that we have to change or we soon will be extinct. Thus it is that many of us, who are pastoral leaders, pester, preach, and down right badger our congregations to change what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Don’t get me wrong; this is not necessarily a bad thing. The church needs to change, the church is changing, but how often do we in leadership live-into the change that we often preach about on Sunday mornings? If we’re willing to ask folks to change something, such as faith, which is so near and dear to their lives, shouldn’t we be models of what it is that change should look like?

I’d like to think that I do this most days, but something tells me, if we’re being honest with each other, that I’ve got a LONG way to go. How about you?